


Second Best

by Riona



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: M/M, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:15:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24943717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: Apparently, it’s not enough to be sent to the brig. Oh, no. Apparently, Rimmer just has to share a cell with a man who won’t shut up about how he’snot the right Rimmer.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 24
Kudos: 80





	Second Best

Apparently, it’s not enough to be sent to the brig. Oh, no. Apparently, Rimmer just has to share a cell with a man who won’t shut up about how he’s _not the right Rimmer_.

As the actual living human the hologrammatic version was based on, Rimmer feels he’s very much the original and correct Rimmer, but try telling that to Lister.

“Maybe it’ll be easier if I think of you as Rimmer’s identical twin, like,” Lister says from the top bunk. “Uh, Dimmer.”

Rimmer, at the table, gives him a look. “If I were my own identical twin, I’m fairly certain I’d still be called Rimmer.”

Lister groans. “That’s true, isn’t it? Smeg.” He pauses. “It’s just weird bunking with this, this _stranger_ with his face.”

“Stranger?” Rimmer echoes, setting down one of the few pieces of literature they’re allowed in their imprisonment. It’s a novel by Ackerman, and it’s dire. “I suppose I dreamt all those tedious months of nurturing you after you came aboard, did I?”

“ _Nurturing?_ Yeah, I think you might’ve.”

“All right, training, then.” Rimmer leans back in his chair; it rocks slightly on its legs. Given that most of the furniture in the rest of the ship is bolted to the floor to avoid zero-gravity mishaps, he has to wonder whether the higher-ups actively _want_ the inmates to beat each other to death with the seating. It’s certainly tempting on occasion. “You have to admit that we’ve at least _met_.”

“I know. I know that.” Lister isn’t looking at Rimmer; he’s picking something no doubt unspeakable out from under his nails. “It’s just... we’ve been through a lot together, me and you. The hologram you, I mean. And now that’s all just... gone, you don’t remember any of it. It didn’t happen with _you_ you.”

“So what you’re saying, Lister,” Rimmer says, “is that you wish I were dead.”

“I’m not saying that,” Lister says. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t mind if you were a different Rimmer, who _happens_ to be dead.”

“Oh, splendid. Thanks for clearing that up. You wouldn’t believe it, but for a moment there I almost thought I was in danger of feeling unappreciated.”

Lister looks at him at last. “You’re really taking this personally, aren’t you?”

“Well, excuse me if I don’t particularly want to hear you mooning over how deeply in love you were with this other, _better_ version of me,” Rimmer says. “I’m sure it was tragic that he didn’t have a physical body and you couldn’t get your end away, but—”

“Nah, that got sorted later on,” Lister says.

There is a pause.

A really quite extensive pause.

“Er, Lister,” Rimmer says, “I may require some clarification here.”

“Yeah, we met this guy who’d invented the hard light drive,” Lister says. “It meant you had a proper body. I mean, you were still a hologram, but you could touch things. Pretty incredible stuff.”

Rimmer awaits further clarification. It doesn’t seem to be coming.

“And?” he asks.

“And what?” Lister asks.

Rimmer shifts restlessly. Folds his arms, unfolds them again. “And... well?”

“Wait,” Lister says. “Wait, are you trying to ask if I shagged you?”

They look at each other for a moment.

“No?” Rimmer tries.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“You were being ambiguous! It was a reasonable thing to wonder with the information I had!”

“You saying you’d have been up for it?” Lister asks.

What?

“Why on Io would I be saying that?” Rimmer demands.

Lister shrugs. Or makes some awkward attempt at shrugging, at least; he’s still mostly lying down. “Well, you thought it might’ve happened. Means you’d have been up for it, right?”

“Not necessarily.”

“ _Yes_ necessarily; what d’you take me for?”

Rimmer casts around desperately. “You probably dosed yourself up with that sexual magnetism virus!”

“Rimmer, it didn’t happen,” Lister says. “You don’t have to run around looking for excuses. I’m not saying it means you’d be up for it _now_ , anyway; we had all that history between us.”

“You’re still saying you think I could _conceive_ of wanting...” He makes a sweeping hand gesture, intended to indicate Lister’s general hideous personage.

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Thanks. Why’re you so fixated on this?”

“I would describe myself as interested to a normal degree in whether my bunkmate wants to climb into my trousers.”

“Have you seen your trousers?” Lister asks. “I’d never fit.”

There’s been an uncomfortable lack of straight answers in this conversation, in more ways than one.

“Should I take all this as assurance that no sexual contact was at any point initiated or desired?” Rimmer asks.

Lister sighs. “You can take it however you want, Rimmer.” He shifts in his bunk, putting his back to Rimmer. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

Rimmer takes a moment to process that.

“Lister,” he says, against his better judgement.

“Look, just leave it, all right?”

“You’ve made the rookie mistake, Lister,” Rimmer says, “of using your ‘tired and defeated’ tone rather than your ‘I’m about to sock you in the face’ one, meaning I know it’s safe to proceed.”

There’s a pause. Lister sits up in his bunk, frowning down at Rimmer: a thoughtful frown, rather than an aggressive one. “So you still know me enough to tell the difference,” he says, quietly. “Even back here.”

They’re not the hardest tones to distinguish. Rimmer has a particular interest in vocal nuances that suggest impending physical violence.

“I’d like to reiterate that we’re not _total_ strangers to each other,” Rimmer says. “It may not be the however many years you keep wittering on about, but I’ve still spent a frankly intolerable amount of time in your company. I probably know things about you that _your_ Rimmer” – he puts as much distaste into the word _your_ as humanly possible – “ended up forgetting. Didn’t you say he spent six hundred years on a sort of... planet of me? That’s got to push out a fond cable repair memory or two.”

“Nah, I wiped most of Rimmerworld out of his memory,” Lister says.

Rimmer stares.

“He asked me to,” Lister says, slightly defensive. “He couldn’t really function with that taking up, what, ninety-five percent of his life? I took the bad parts of Rimmerworld out of his head, let him keep the good parts.” He pauses. “Think he ended up with about three hours.”

There but for the grace of nanobots, apparently. “Right. Well, the point remains: I’m still _Rimmer_. I’m not necessarily someone you _like_ , but I’m someone you know. I’m not... not Steve Deve with a face transplant.”

“Who’s Steve Deve?”

“Someone you don’t know,” Rimmer says. “That’s the point.”

Another pause.

“I guess Holly said he brought you back in the first place because we knew each other best,” Lister admits.

Did he really? That’s depressing.

Lister fidgets with the bedclothes.

“I had all these dreams about him,” Lister mumbles, eventually. “The other Rimmer. After he put on that stupid smegging wig and flew off in that fancy spaceship. I didn’t think I’d miss him like that.”

Dreams? This seems a potentially uncomfortable route to—

Wait.

“Er, excuse me,” Rimmer says. “I was under the impression that the other me essentially double-died. Didn’t you say his light bee stopped functioning?”

Lister stares at him for a moment. Coughs. “Yeah, well, you know, it’s a euphemism, innit?”

“A euphemism?” Rimmer asks. “Look, I realise there are a lot of euphemisms for death. I’d have accepted ‘passed away’ or ‘shuffled off the post-mortal coil’ or ‘unclogged his last soup nozzle’. I’m not sure I can accept ‘put on that stupid smegging wig and flew off in that fancy spaceship’.”

“Yeah, the fancy spaceship of Death,” Lister says. “Wearing the stupid wig... of Death.”

“Why would you tell me I died when I didn’t?” Rimmer asks. “Do you have any idea how demoralising that is?”

“Okay, you still died,” Lister says. “You just didn’t _hologram_ -die.”

“Then why tell me I did?”

Lister hesitates.

And then he explains.

“Okay,” Rimmer says at last, when Lister’s finished telling his absurd story. “I hate to break it to you, but I absolutely _did_ hologram-die, because there is no possible way I survived more than two days as some sort of dimension-hopping do-gooder.”

Lister winces. “Don’t say that.”

“Sending me out to be some intergalactic hero? _Me?_ I mean, what were you thinking? I thought you said we’d got to know each other when I was a hologram. Or were you _trying_ to get me killed?”

“You’re more capable than you think, y’know,” Lister says. He pauses. “Probably. I mean, I was ready to bet on it.”

“God, you really were smegging in love with him, weren’t you?” Rimmer asks. “That’s all I need.”

-

Ackerman stops by their cell to inform Rimmer, pleasantly, that his request for a transfer has been denied. He must be in a good mood; Rimmer’s nose hardly ends up bleeding at all.

“You asked for a cell transfer?” Lister asks, lying on his front, his arms dangling off the side of his bunk. “Why?”

Rimmer looks up from the floor, which is where he usually finds himself after Ackerman’s visits. “Well, it hardly matters now.”

“You wouldn’t’ve got to pick who they moved you in with,” Lister says. “You’d take cellmate Russian roulette over my guitar?”

“Yes, actually, but that’s not the reason.”

“So what is?”

Rimmer tries to stand up. It’s an error. He shuffles across the floor to sit with his back against the wall instead.

“I’m concerned about your feelings for this other version of me,” he says, stiffly.

“Are you serious?” Lister asks. “Is this bog-standard homophobia, or does it just freak you out that anyone could be stupid enough to care about you?”

“It’s clear that having me here is emotionally difficult for you, so I thought I’d nobly request a transfer and—”

“Oh, smeg off,” Lister says.

“Yes, well,” Rimmer says, “that’s exactly what I tried to do, but it seems we’re stuck with each other. Still, look on the bright side; maybe a couple of years in here will be a bonding experience to rival all that time with your precious _dead_ Rimmer.”

He regrets saying it even before the words have fully left his mouth.

“Wait.” Lister swings himself out of his bunk, stands with his arms crossed and head cocked, looking down at Rimmer. “Are you _jealous?_ ”

He can still salvage this conversation. “Yes, Lister, because there’s so much to envy about a dead git who had the good fortune to be fawned over by _you_. Let me guess: are you still wearing the same pair of boxers you came out of stasis in?”

“Nah, Kryten made me change them.”

“Didn’t you say you met Kryten, what, a year after you emerged?”

“I was on my own in deep space!” Lister protests. “It’s not like I was going on the pull every night!”

“The fact remains that I know you have athlete’s foot and I strongly suspect you have athlete’s testicles,” Rimmer says. “Why would I be jealous?”

Lister grins. It’s infuriating. “I don’t know, but you are, aren’t you?”

Rimmer takes a couple of deep breaths.

“It’s just frustrating to hear someone singing the praises of a me who isn’t me,” he says. “That’s all. I don’t want you drawing any sordid conclusions.”

He pauses.

“So,” he says, trying to make it sound very casual and by-the-way, “what were these dreams you were talking about?”

Lister’s grin broadens.

“Don’t,” Rimmer says.

“Don’t smile?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Just – don’t.”

“Don’t _think?_ ”

“It’s hardly an unreasonable request; you’re rather an expert,” Rimmer says. “Just show me what you did in these dreams, and we can—”

“ _Show_ you?” Lister asks.

Smeg. “Tell me, I meant.”

“Show you,” Lister repeats.

Rimmer points at him, accusatory. “You’re thinking again!”

“Oh, sorry,” Lister says. “My mistake. Don’t know why these thoughts keep crossing my mind when all you did was innocently ask me to snog you.”

Something catches in the vicinity of Rimmer’s lungs. “Well, I didn’t know snogging would be involved, did I? For all I knew, you’d had a totally innocent series of dreams about backgammon.”

“Yeah, sorry, no backgammon set in this cell,” Lister says. “We’ll have to do the dreams about kissing instead.”

He sits on the floor, facing Rimmer, wincing as he does. It really is outrageously unfair that Lister’s so unfit and yet Rimmer, the one who actually exercises, is the one who died first.

Well, all right, a regular morning jog isn’t going to make anyone immune to radiation poisoning, but rightly it feels like it _should_.

Rimmer is focusing very hard on that so he doesn’t have to think about what Lister just said.

“Rimmer?” Lister shifts closer to him, waves a hand in front of his eyes. Rimmer tries to move backwards, but there’s still a wall at his back, so he doesn’t succeed, and frankly it would be worrying if he did.

“Look, I’m just giving you smeg,” Lister says. “I’ll back off if you want me to.”

“Oh, yes,” Rimmer says. “Scurry off with your tail between your legs. You’ve never carried anything through; why start now?”

Lister sighs. “Rimmer, d’you want me to kiss you or not?”

It’s a matter of principle by this point. Isn’t it? It’s a matter of principle. There are principles here, somewhere, and it’s Rimmer’s duty—

“You’ve been told to demonstrate these dreams, haven’t you?” Rimmer demands. “If you’re too much of a coward—”

He hasn’t finished talking by the time Lister crawls forward and kisses him. Rimmer freezes.

In retrospect, this was probably foreseeable.

Lister tastes, predictably, like he hasn’t brushed his teeth in three days. This was definitely an error of judgement.

Why did Rimmer have to issue this challenge while sitting on the floor? Where Lister has to practically – practically _straddle_ him?

“Like that,” Lister says at last, breaking away. “Only he was a better kisser.”

All of the things Rimmer intended to say – _well, that was a mistake, let’s just quietly erase it from the history books and never mention it again_ – are instantly chased out by outrage. “Smeg off. He was _not_.”

“What, your self-esteem is so low you don’t even believe you could kiss properly in someone else’s dream?”

“I’ve already had to listen to all this tosh about how much better I am when I’m dead,” Rimmer says. “I won’t sit here and listen to you wistfully reminiscing about dead _dream_ me as well. Are there any other versions of me you’d like to wax poetic about?”

Lister shrugs. “Ace was pretty impressive.”

“This is the version of me you get,” Rimmer says. “You’d better get used to it.”

A grin creeps onto Lister’s face again. “I _get_ you, do I?”

“This—” Rimmer has to pause and clear his throat. “This is the version of me who – who happens to be here, in your vicinity.”

Lister laughs and kisses him again.


End file.
